by Cornel West
CW: But I wonder—here my own view becomes more manifest and pressing—when you look at it from the perspective of the powers that be, what do they find most threatening? That’s always a measure, you see. And they are threatened by any serious challenge to their oligarchic power, to their profit-driven economic system and their cultural forms of distraction that keep the masses pacified. And I think that in the long run, they are more threatened by Ella Baker’s mode of engagement; in the short run, they are more threatened by Martin King’s mode of engagement, because for the FBI and the CIA and other repressive apparatuses in the nation-state in which we live, that patience and that receptivity, you can keep track of that more easily, and you can infiltrate it quicker,17 whereas if the people who don’t have revolutionary consciousness but do have a love for one leader, they see that leader shot down and mistreated, they are more likely to rebel. Now, that’s not revolutionary action; that’s rebellion.18 And given the constraints of the system, in which electoral politics is so much dominated by big money and so forth, it’s the rebellions that have played a fundamental role in getting concessions from the powers that be, more so than the long-term organizing that’s quiet on the margins, hardly visible. When you have two hundred cities going up in flames, the powers that be have to concede something. They could go fascist and say, “No concessions at all,” or they can be moderate and say, “We have to give a little bit. We have to be open for the expansion of the middle class. We have to bring in a relatively privileged people from the working class: women, Black folk, brown folk, red folk, or whatever.” This middle class of color is a lumpenbourgeoisie beneath the wealthier white bourgeoisie.
But I do think that—this is the Chekhov in me, of course19—I think that the cycles of domination and the cycles of death and the cycles of dogmatism are so deeply entrenched in human history, that more than likely the best we can do is to break the cycle. And even what we call revolution, when you think you really have broken the cycle in, say, the Soviet Union, Cuba, or what have you, the same cycle comes right back in new clothing. The men are heroic against the white supremacist powers, but look what they’re doing to the women, and the straights are heroic, but look what they are doing to the gay brothers and lesbian sisters and bisexuals and transsexuals and so forth. Or the elderly seem to be heroic, but look how they are demeaning the youth—these different kinds of cycles. And, so, I am not suggesting that there are no breakthroughs or progress or betterment or amelioration, but Ella Baker is most relevant because she tells a fundamental truth about the need for democratic organizing. King becomes highly relevant in our time, less relevant than Ella in regard to democratic leadership. Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer stand above Martin Luther King in their democratic existentialism; their democratic leadership and horizontal organization stand above his messianic leadership and hierarchical organization. All three have a love supreme for the people that is so visible, that cannot be denied. King’s organizing fits well with market time and his murder generated massive outrage, and you end up with a real rupture in the cycle. It’s not a change in the system, but it’s a rupture in the cycle, and the powers that be have to make some concessions, you see. But deep democratic revolution requires the democratic existentialism of Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer.
CHB: Back to the kind of organizing Baker practiced. I think one could distinguish even within her work the very patient, slow-pace education of groups and what follows from that and what she herself, I think, saw as the need for a more radical pushing of groups. That’s why, to go back to that, she joined the youth and cofounded SNCC, because she hoped that, from that more radical group, less bourgeois, less concerned with respectability, and more radical in a broad sense, that something like a rupture might result, even out of a group. I think that was her hope. So she tries to do both, patient grassroots organizing and speeding up the process through work with radical groups, which I think is particularly difficult. And one would have to ask oneself how far she got, but do you see the possibility of radicalizing groups, too, so that they work like charismatic leaders?
CW: Yes. You see, in my own view, that kind of crucial radicalizing of the group toward a more revolutionary consciousness becomes one of the essential elements in the rebellion. That is to say, when the rupture takes place and the system must just stop and respond rather than just keep going on and trying to deny the suffering of the people who are revolting. Now, whether in the end that generates the kind of system change that she wanted and I want, I don’t know. But in my more Chekhovian thinking, I can see not so much a cycle but a spiralling, where these systems of domination and oligarchies reemerge and the hierarchies reemerge, the anti-democratic forms reemerge, and that revolutionary consciousness is this deep democratic consciousness suspicious of those hierarchies, suspicious of those oligarchies, and so on.
Here Clausewitz’s philosophy of war20 plays an important role for me—not in a moral sense but a crass political sense, in terms of just how cruel the struggle for power is and how gangster-like these thugs are who run things at the very, very top, who would kill anybody and do anything to reproduce their power. You see, you look at the number of times Martin went to jail, while Ella hardly ever went to jail—stark contrast! And when you talk about rupture, you’re talking about a threefold moment of, first, hitting the streets—and Ella is already in the streets—and, second, being willing to go to jail, and, third, being willing to be killed. If you don’t have those three elements, you don’t have a movement. That is to say, you have to have people who are willing to take that kind of risk, and you need the blood of those martyrs to help fertilize the movement, which is not to view those martyrs as instruments, because they are still human beings, but that’s the historical process. That’s how bloody it is. It is just a fact. It can’t be denied. When you juxtapose Ella Baker to Martin King, you see, one of the reasons why Martin’s death generated the rebellions it did was because all three of those moments were satisfied and in a way in which they were not satisfied for Ella. Now, that’s partly again a matter of both gender and theory. She called him the “Great One” and had her powerful critiques, but she never denied his deep love for the people, you see, just like she had that deep love for the people, as everybody who knew her, like Bernice Reagon, one of the great artists of the movement,21 would say over and over again. But that’s an interesting contrast when you think about it.
CHB: But I still wonder about certain aspects of that contrast. Now, Ella Baker could not have been the charismatic leader,22 so the group did not feel represented by her. No one could have that identifying moment one had with King. So when you say this is threefold—you go to the street, you go to jail, and you get killed—she would not have gotten killed; it was not very likely. But does that really mean that revolt can only happen with the model of the charismatic leader? If we look again at the Occupy movement today, people go to the street; they are willing to go to jail; they are even willing to die. But there is no charismatic figure, and yet you have these three moments, or would you still make a distinction as to their effectiveness?
CW: That’s an interesting question. You see, I think that when you satisfy all three of those moments in light of the Ella Baker model, I am not so sure that the death or deaths that take place could have the same galvanizing effect as the death of a highly charismatic, highly visible figure who touched the hearts, minds, and souls of people, you see. And because precious ordinary people are in a condition of catastrophe and wrestling with desperation, for them to break out of a mind-set that is deferential to the powers that be, it is only a love that they have for someone they identified with, who was out there speaking on their behalf, that has the power to move them to rebellion.
CHB: It’s very interesting, because both models work with the insight that it is not enough to understand a problem and then act politically; you need the emotional involvement. In the first model, we have the love toward a leader that you identify with and who acts for you. Now, Ella B
aker would have said, “This is not my model, because it harms the potential activity of the group, of the masses, if they delegate. So I want the other model. What then is my means of arousing emotion? It is personal connections. People have to interconnect.” And, again, you can say, and rightly so, it is so slow; it takes time to bring this process to a point that it becomes efficient. But to her it was the emotional binding of people that she would say is needed, but it works differently and, again, slower, not in market time.
CW: Exactly. I think, in the end, we have to say that there should be no discussion of Martin Luther King Jr. without Ella Baker, which is to say they are complementary. These two figures, voices, tendencies in the Black freedom movement, and particularly in the human freedom movement in general, they say something to young people these days in the age of Obama. See, Obama ends up being the worst example of messianic leadership, captured by a vicious system that is oligarchic domestically and imperialistic globally and uses the resonances of this precious freedom struggle as a way of legitimating himself in the eyes of both the Black people and the mainstream Americans, and acting as if as community organizer he has some connection to Ella Baker, which is absurd and ludicrous in light of him running this oligarchic system and being so proud of heading the killing machine of US imperial powers. So that when young people—who now find themselves in an even more desperate situation given the present crisis—think about the legacy of Martin King and the legacy of Ella Baker in the age of Obama, it compounds the misunderstandings and misconstructions, and sabotages the intellectual clarity and political will necessary to create the kind of change we need. To use jazz metaphors, what we need would be the expression and articulation of different tempos and different vibrations and different actions and different witnesses, so it’s antiphonal; it’s call-and-response, and in the call-and-response, there are Ella Baker–like voices tied to various kinds of deep democratic witnesses that have to do with everyday people organizing themselves. And then you’ve got the Martin-like voices that are charismatic, which are very much tied to a certain kind of messianic leadership, which must be called into question, which must be democratized, which must be de-patriarchalized. And yet they are part of this jazz combo.23
CHB: But it means we need to turn our attention to Ella Baker, because historically she has had—and understandably so, given the strong effect of charismatic leaders—she has had much less attention in the historical reception of the movement.
CW: Yes. Absolutely. And again, one of the ironies—I never met Ella Baker, but I recall taking my class down to the film Fundi when I was at Union Theological Seminary thirty years ago.24 I was overwhelmed by it. Oh I was overwhelmed by it. It hit me so hard, because I just so much resonated with Ella. I could see Curtis Mayfield in her; I could see Bessie Smith in her; I could see the great gospel artist Shirley Caesar in her; I could see Aretha Franklin in her. And nothing moves me more than that level of artistic engagement with suffering and transfiguring it into vision and witness. I said to myself, “Ella Baker is one of the most charismatic figures I’ve seen on film, and yet she is fighting against charisma”; you know what I mean. So, what happens is, her critique of charisma goes hand in hand with an enactment of a kind of quiet, unassuming charisma, which swept me away.
Now, it could be that I am just tied to charisma in various forms, but I do think that you get ordinary people like Louis Armstrong; this brother is charismatic—and a genius—to the core. Now, with Ella Baker, you see it in the way she interacts. You look in her eyes and you get a sense of how she is reading people when she is silent that has its own kind of charisma, you know. Maybe it’s a charisma to be deployed in democratic time in the service of the self-organization of everyday people. Martin’s charisma is more usable in a market time, though it is just as genuine as Ella’s charisma. I think, in the end, Ella’s is probably closer to my own soul, but in terms of how you deal with this vicious system in which we find ourselves, you can see why Martin’s love, which is continuous with Ella’s love, becomes indispensable, and his death is nothing but an extension of his love. I mean, Martin’s death is nothing but the love-ethic at work, just as Ella’s long-distance struggles are extensions of a love-ethic at work, and both of them encountered that love-ethic in the Black family, initially in the Black church. And yet both, in the end, were scandalized by the Black church, which is to say they both end up on the margins of it, even as they are products of it. For brother Martin and sister Ella, it is a privilege to live and die for everyday people.
CHB: But for reasons that have nothing to do with their spirituality but rather with their outspoken political opinions in terms of how, for example, they use the word socialism.25
CW: That’s right. Explicitly, publicly.
CHB: Yes, and the demand for the change of the system—they resemble each other very much in what they demand, certainly the later King and, well, maybe even the early Baker,26 but certainly the later King.
CW: That’s very true. Now, the speech that she gave in defense of Puerto Rican independence in Madison Square Garden is something that the film Fundi and other scholars have made much of, and there she engages in explicit talk about colonialism, imperialism, some things that she had always talked about but that now were more publicly projected. And to be publicly associated with a Puerto Rican independence movement—of the great Pedro Albizu Campos and Lolita Lebrón—that was perceived to be an extension of the kind of terrorist attack on the US Congress.27 You know, for anybody, let alone a Black woman, to be associated with that kind of movement, which in the eyes of the public was nothing but crude terrorism, required a level of courage, which brings us back to that willingness to take a risk even in her own quiet—and in this case, not so quiet—way, because she was quite eloquent in her speech in front of thousands of people in Madison Square Garden. Absolutely. Absolutely.
Malcolm X, 1964
CHAPTER FIVE
Revolutionary Fire
MALCOLM X
We agreed that a conversation about Malcolm X was a must, although he is undoubtedly the most controversial of the Black prophetic figures. Among too many white Americans he is often seen as a proponent of reversed racism, if not of hatred and violence. But even the Black community has been divided in assessing his status as a political leader. While the working poor respected his eloquence and honesty, and the “old” middle class was horrified, the “new” lower-middle class, especially students, greatly admired his rhetoric and sincerity. In part, the controversy is due to the continuous juxtaposition between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., a false opposition that is based on one-sided public images and that has led to a sanitized Martin and a demonized Malcolm, a gross mistake that overlooks what they share in common and how much they overlap.
In the fall of 2012, Occupy Wall Street was evicted from public spaces in a concerted action by law enforcement all over the United States, from New York City to Oakland. When we met in January 2013 for our dialogue on Malcolm X, it seemed to be the perfect time to discuss his revolutionary fire and its legacy among the younger generation.
CHRISTA BUSCHENDORF: You have repeatedly written about Malcolm X. In Prophesy Deliverance!, for example, you positioned Malcolm X as “the transitional figure who stands between King and the Black Marxists.”1 In your essay “Malcolm X and Black Rage,” you compared him with both his mentor Elijah Muhammad and Martin Luther King Jr., claiming that “Malcolm X articulated black rage in a manner unprecedented in American history. His style of communicating this rage bespoke a boiling urgency and an audacious sincerity.” And you went on to state: “His profound commitment to affirm black humanity at any cost and his tremendous courage to accent the hypocrisy of American society made Malcolm X the prophet of black rage—then and now.”2 As to Malcolm X’s cultural and political influence on yourself and Black fellow students at Harvard, you stressed in our dialogue on Martin King his attraction in terms of his style, his swagger, in contrast to the much revered, but to the y
outh less appealing, respectable King. And you pointed out that you would identify with Malcolm X’s political vision rather than listening to the voice of the “Great Man who died for us,”3 a viewpoint, as you add, that was to shift in the next decade. In fact, more recently you seem to have been highlighting the relevance of King. How then would you assess the impact of Malcolm X on African American political struggle and your own fight for justice and freedom today?
CORNEL WEST: Malcolm X is the great figure of revolutionary parrhesia in the Black prophetic tradition. The term parrhesia goes back to line 24A of Plato’s Apology, where Socrates says, the cause of my unpopularity was my parrhesia, my fearless speech, my frank speech, my plain speech, my unintimidated speech. Malcolm is unique among the figures in the prophetic tradition to the degree to which he was willing to engage in unintimidated speech in public about white supremacy. We have had a number of Black figures who have done that in the Black context, but not in public the way Malcolm did. In that sense, he represents the standard. He reminds me of jazz musicians like Charles Mingus, who are always tied to the underdog, always looking at the world from below, but speaking so clearly.
Now what was he saying? Brother Malcolm begins where Marcus Garvey4 left off, which is to say he represents a Black Nationalist tradition. But he is a revolutionary within that Black Nationalist tradition. And, like Garvey, he begins with the idea that the world has made being Black a crime—I intend to make it a virtue. White supremacy had told Black people that Black history is a curse, Black hope is a joke, and Black freedom is a pipe-dream, and you are locked in; you are trapped in a white-supremacist maze or labyrinth, and there is no way out. And Marcus Garvey, Elijah Muhammad, and the others came along and said: “The Negro is unafraid.” So what Malcolm does is, he begins with this notion of the world making being Black a crime. He responds to this condition of being cursed and trapped by courageously exemplifying what it is and means to say: “I am unafraid. I will speak my mind.” He is able to do so because of the love of Elijah Muhammad. Malcolm Little was a gangster, a street-gangster and hustler. And in the cell in Massachusetts,5 he feels the love of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad—who is, of course, often viewed as a hater because he did believe that white people were devils, and he is wrong about that.6 But Elijah Muhammad had a deep love of Black people, and he loved Malcolm Little into giving him the self-confidence to become Malcolm X.